Growth hacking guide

How to start and sustain a more agile approach to grow your business and optimize your online marketing

How will this guide help me and my business?

The growth hacking approach (that you also have heard called ‘agile marketing’ and ‘growth marketing’) focuses on test and learn techniques to rapidly boost awareness, lead generation and conversion. It originated in the startup scene on the West coast of the US several years ago and early adopters included Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription businesses and social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Since this time, the concept has been enthusiastically worldwide and not only in startups. Larger businesses have also sought to change their mindset towards a more iterative, continuous approach to increasing sales, often related to conversion rate optimization projects.

This guide aims to show how growth hacking concepts can be applied to established medium and large businesses as they seek to develop more agile marketing approaches. Naturally, the checklists in this guide will also be useful for start-up and smaller businesses also.

What does the growth hacking guide contain?

This guide explains all of the elements needed to ‘growth hack’ your way to increased sales (with a limited budget). It includes:

An overview of what growth hacking is (including new frameworks such as the 5 pillars of growth hacking based on research by the author that have never been published before)
A practical, step-by-step guide on how to growth hack
Growth hacking case studies including agile development using Scrum and Real-Time Marketing
Practical tools and technologies to help you effectively growth hack your way to increased sales

Who is the growth hacking guide for?

This guide is designed for marketers across all different sizes of business. It's been created to be useful for start-ups or small businesses as well as marketers working in more established marketing departments.

Although the term ‘hacking’ suggests it is only used by 'techies', traditional businesses such as The Metro newspaper, Regus Offices and Penguin Books are also using the principles of growth hacking. This indicates that the concept is not just relevant to technology start-ups and this movement has wider implications. Think of it as ‘digital disruption impacting marketing’ since technology is the enabler for marketers to understand and respond to user behaviour more rapidly. So, you don't have to have any kind of technology background to benefit from our growth hacking guide!

How is this guide structured?

Introduction
What is growth hacking?
The growth hacking process (including the five pillars of growth hacking)
Creating sustainable growth
Resources

Resource Details

Author: Tanya Hemphill
Format: Downloadable PDF guide

About the author

Tanya Hemphill

Tanya Hemphill consults tech companies and large corporates on growth marketing strategies and digital transformation. She’s a Senior Lecturer and Marketing Programme Leader at Manchester Metropolitan University. Currently researching for a PhD, Tanya has an MSc in Digital Marketing Communications (with Distinction) and is one the of UK’s leading experts on growth hacking/agile marketing. She’s researched and published a number of publications on the subject and presented at Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) conferences.

Tanya is the co-author of the seventh edition of ‘Digital Business and Ecommerce Management’ (originally written by Dave Chaffey) and has developed course materials for CIM Digital Strategy courses. She’s also run training workshops for companies such as KPMG, Harvey Nash, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, The NHS, Monsanto, PHS Datashred and AkzoNobel. Her expertise covers: digital transformation, digital marketing strategy and planning, social media strategy, content marketing.

You can follow Tanya on Twitter, connect with her on LinkedIn and/or read her blog.